Farmer’s Market On Wheels Delivers Veggies To Toronto’s Food Deserts

Food deserts are defined as areas without proper access to fresh, healthy and affordable food. Toronto’s recently launched Mobile Good Food Market wants to overcome this problem by selling fresh produce on the streets in areas where people have few nutritious food options.

Do you still remember your New Year’s resolutions? You might have promised yourself to eat more veggies, or to prepare healthy meals more often. It all seems easy to accomplish in areas where farmer’s markets are popping up and where fresh vegetables and fruits are stacked in pyramids at supermarkets. But some urban areas are lacking grocery stores at all, or stores don’t sell the food that forms the basis of a healthy and balanced diet.

In order to give urbanites in food deserts access to fresh and healthy food, some Torontonians came up with the Mobile Good Food Market. This unconventional food truck, donated by the Toronto Transit Commission and converted by architecture office LGA, functions as a mobile market stall stocked up with seasonal greens. The project is an initiative of FoodShare Toronto in partnership with the City of Toronto and United Way Toronto and to help enable a fresh and seasonal selection of veggies and fruits in low-income areas where unhealthy food is often the only option.

Here’s another solution for putting those tools gathering dust in your house to use: make them available for lending at your local Tool Library! Opening next month, Toronto’s Tool Library is one of many similar projects that have popped up all over North America, Australia and Europe. The recent popularity of tool libraries is another example of how the peer-to-peer economy continues to gain popularity and evolve, changing the way we interact with each other and our cities.

Food trucks have become really popular in many cities around the world. Now also other organizations start to see the potential of offering their services in a flexible way. Inspired by the food trucks, Boston launched its City Hall To Go — a truck that travels the city’s neighborhoods to get in touch with local communities. Doing so, the flexible city hall aims to bring civil services to the people. As the Boston area measures almost 50 square miles, traveling all the way downtown to City Hall can be a big hassle for residents. Making the City Hall mobile solves this problem.

Similar to a recent posting on Jilly Ballistic, the targets of this guerrilla artwork are advertisements. In general, billboards are a blight on the urbanscape. But, what if these eyesores took up space meant to provide city dwellers and visitors with useful information? The creative team, cARTographyTO, has been responsible for hacking 35 advertisement signs (ironically named…

We can’t seem to get enough stories on food trucks and shipping containers. So finding Del Popolo on the Inhabitat site really made us swoon. This is a mammoth of a food truck made from a 20-foot shipping container. It was first dreamed up by veteran pie slinger Jon Darsky of San Francisco and made its street debut this past May.